"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."
A.J. Liebling

Thursday, February 9, 2017

George Ade: Indiana's Warmhearted Satirist

The
1908 presidential contest pitted two would-be reformers against each other. In
June in Chicago
the Republicans nominated William Howard Taft, groomed for the post by former
President Theodore Roosevelt. The Democrats responded by selecting William Jennings Bryan, who would be making his third, and last, attempt for the
nation’s highest office. And while Bryan
was shocked by his staggering million-vote loss to Taft at the polls, perhaps
the campaign’s biggest surprise came at the beginning when Taft decided to open
his race for the White House in the small Indiana town of Brook.

Brook
may have been a tiny dot on Indiana's map, but it did have something other
Hoosier towns did not: the spacious country estate of Indiana journalist,
playwright, and “warmhearted satirist,” George Ade. Hazelden Farm was the scene
of a number of large parties and celebrations in the thirty-nine years Ade
resided there; enough, in fact, that Ade’s biographer recalled it being
described as the “amusement center of the United States.” Ade himself noted
in an autobiographical piece: “I love to put on big parties or celebrations and
see a throng of people having a good time.”

Born
on February 9, 1866, Ade was the second youngest of seven children raised by
John and Adaline (Bush) Ade. “From the time I could read,” Ade remembered later
in life, “I had my nose in a book, and I lacked enthusiasm for manual labor.”
His aversion to physical work, especially his dislike for farming, troubled his
father, who wondered how his son would make a living. In 1883 Ade started
classes at Purdue University. His
attention, however, soon focused on the Grand Opera House in Lafayette, where he became a regular
patron—sometimes to the detriment of his studies. Ade noted that he was a “star
student as a Freshman but wobbly later on and a total loss in Mathematics.”
Still, while at the university he did meet and begin a lifelong friendship with
Hoosier cartoonist John T. McCutcheon.

After
graduating from Purdue in 1887 with a bachelor of science degree, Ade started
work as a reporter for the Lafayette Call
at the princely sum of six dollars per week. Along with his low salary, Ade
had to cope with a frugal editor, who, for example, liked to use old envelopes
as copy paper. Ade later moved on to a job writing testimonials for a patent
medicine company's tobacco-habit cure. In recalling Ade’s work for the firm,
McCutcheon noted that the cure was not a fake remedy, “for it was guaranteed to
cure the most persistent tobacco habit if the tobacco user followed the
directions. The first direction was to discontinue the use of tobacco and then
take the tablets.”

By
1890 Ade had joined McCutcheon on the staff of the Chicago Morning News. Ade's first regular assignment was a daily
weather story. His big break came when
the steamer Tioga exploded on the Chicago River and Ade, because no other reporters were
available, rushed to the scene and produced the best account of the tragedy.
His success led to his covering such important events as the heavyweight
championship fight between John L. Sullivan and James J. “Gentleman Jim”
Corbett in New Orleans
and the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

In
November 1893 Ade was put in charge of the column “Stories of the Streets and
of the Town,” which also featured McCutcheon's illustrations. In his writing
Ade captured life on Chicago’s
bustling streets through the antics of such characters as Artie, a young office
boy; Doc’ Horne, a “gentlemanly liar”; and Pink Marsh, a shoeshine boy in a
barbershop. Ade’s column was also the birthplace of the work that made him
famous: fables.

Fables in Slang, published in 1899, was an
immediate hit with the public, selling sixty-nine thousand copies that year
alone. These “modern fables” were syndicated nationally, produced as movies by
the Essanay Film Company, and turned into comic strips by cartoonist Art
Helfant. Kansas
newspaper editor William Allen White was moved to write that he “would rather
have written Fables in Slang than be
President.” Despite such lavish attention, Ade remained levelheaded, wryly
noting: “By a queer twist of circumstances I have become known to the general
public as a ‘humorist’ and a writer of ‘slang.’ I never wanted to be a comic or
tried to be one. Always I wrote for the ‘family trade’ and I used no word or
phrase which might give offense to mother and the girls or a professor of
English.

Ade
next turned his humorist’s pen to the theater, writing his first Broadway
play, The Sultan of Sulu, a comic opera about America's activities in the
Philippines, in 1902. Other hit plays soon followed, including Peggy from Paris, a musical comedy; The County Chairman, a drama about
small-town politics; and his best-known play, The College Widow, a comedy about college life and football set on
the WabashCollege campus in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

While
Ade was busy writing and traveling, frequently abroad, back home in Indiana his
brother William was acquiring on Ade’s behalf numerous acres of farmland in
Newton County. In 1902 William Ade bought four hundred and seventeen acres near
the town of Brook.
Impressed by the wooded land, George Ade called on his friend Billy Mann, a Chicago architect, to
design a small dwelling for him that would cost $2,500. A suggestion here and a
suggestion there later, Ade ended up with an impressive English
Manor/Tudor-style home that cost approximately $25,000.

Ade,
who moved into his Hazelden Farm estate in the summer of 1904, described his
home as “about the size of a girl’s school, with added wings for the managers,
otherwise known as employees.” Included with the home and elaborate gardens
were a swimming pool, greenhouse, barn, caretaker's cottage, fuel supply house,
and a forty-foot-tall water tank.

Once
settled into his new home, Ade wasted little time in making his neighbors feel
welcome, hosting numerous parties. Along with Taft’s visit, Hazelden was the
site of celebrations for the Indiana Society of Chicago, PurdueUniversity
alumni, and local children. Ade also hosted a rally for Theodore Roosevelt's
Bull Moose Party in 1912; a homecoming for soldiers and sailors on 4 July 1919;
and a party and speech for vice presidential candidate General Charles W. Dawes
in 1924. It was McCutcheon who best captured the spirited, and crowded, times at
his friend’s home when he noted: “If all the Sigma Chis, Purdue students,
Indiana friends, movie stars, stage stars, political mass meetings, golf
professionals and automobile clubs from Chicago, Indiana, New York and
Hollywood, who have eaten the famous fried chicken at Hazelden farm, being
regaled the while by the stories of one of the greatest American raconteurs,
were stood in a row, the line would reach from hell to breakfast.”

Ade
died on May 16, 1944, in Brook after an illness of many months. Following his
death Hazelden was turned over to PurdueUniversity. Unable to
afford its upkeep, the university turned the site over to the state, which also
could not afford to maintain the home and in turn gave it to NewtonCounty.
In 1962 Hazelden was acquired by the George Ade Memorial Association, formed
that same year in Kentland. The association raised the necessary funds to
renovate the home and restore a number of rooms to their original condition.

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About Me

I am the author of a number of books on Indiana history. My works have included biographies of such figures as Gus Grissom, Ernie Pyle, Lew Wallace, Juliet Strauss, and May Wright Sewall. I also serve as senior editor of the Indiana Historical Society's popular history magazine Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History. I am also available to lecture on a number of topics related to Indiana history. To arrange a talk, contact me at: reboomer@yahoo.com